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Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Scaremongering About Vaccines.

The coverage of the cervical cancer jab has been ridiculous, with a flood of speculation that the girl who died was killed by the jab followed by a trickle of reporting that she probably wasn't.

Of course it it possible that some people will have bad reactions to some vaccines even if that doesn't appear to have occurred here. However as Theodore Dalrymple points out we have become so accustomed to the benefits of vaccination that the minuscule risks are no longer weighed against the dangers of infectious diseases.

The comments on this Daily Mail thread have to be read to be believed, with a solid majority of commentators peddling psuedo science, hypochondria and conspiracy theories (I'm not a fan of the government but anyone who thinks they are covering up the mass poisoning of children to protect the pharmaceutical industry's profits is insane).

Although deaths among 14 year old girls are very rare they do happen, the risk of death at that age is around 1 in 5000. So if there are roughly 500,000 14 year old girls in the UK then around 100 will die each year. If they have all received a jab that year then it is highly likely that once every couple of years someone will die with 24 hours of being vaccinated. These will be heavily publicised whereas the far more frequent deaths from HPV related cancers among adults will be ignored, unless it's Jade Goody.

As there are several routine vaccinations at around that age, it is amazing that more deaths don't get spuriously linked to vaccinations.

The Daily Mail coverage of this story was shockingly amateurish and they drew their conclusions before the scientists had even had a chance to look into the case - and, naturally, they found no link between the girl's tragic death and the vaccine.

"Strange how that fact seems to have been forgotten when people choose newspapers to blame for panic-mongering."

I don't doubt that, panic mongering isn't restricted to the Daily Mail (although as LfaT says their coverage of this case has been awful).

Check out this New York Times piece on Michelle Obama which approvingly reports her efforts to block the use of the HPV vaccine in Chicago schools:

"She also altered the hospital’s research agenda. When the human papillomavirus vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer, became available, researchers proposed approaching local school principals about enlisting black teenage girls as research subjects.

Mrs. Obama stopped that. The prospect of white doctors performing a trial with black teenage girls summoned the specter of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment of the mid-20th century, when white doctors let hundreds of black men go untreated to study the disease."

Reading the Guardian comments, the people worrying about panic mongering scare me as much as Cath Elliot.

There is a danger in ill informed people writing stuff in newspapers but it doesn't seem to me that the experts always get it right either. The MMR scare started in the Lancet and that was the expert journal.

Restricting discussion to so called experts means that the establishment would have a veto and could protect their own. Ultimately this amounts to a statist charter.

Nor am I convinced by the idea of stupid sheeple needing to be led. We are apparently always on the verge of mob violence and outright panic. It sounds similar to the excuse given for MONA. As individualist's we ought to trust freedom and the ability of people to get it right on their own.

Sure newspapers will get it wrong but they will also get a kicking. Truth emerges in the end if we allow freedom.

And in case it isn't clear, I not accusing Ross of being in favour of banning such articles, I am talking about the self righteous Guardian commentators.

The problem with the MMR vaccine affair was that, instead of realising they had a PR problem on their hands, the government doubled down on the threats and scaremongering. That just made people more sucpicious...